RPOP A 1696048 Romeyn[1]

RPOP1696048 VOL 54, ISS 1-2 (Anti) ‘new antisemitism’ as a transnational field of racial governance ESTHER ROMEYN QUERY SHEET This page lists questions we have about your paper. The numbers displayed at left are hyperlinked to the location of the query in your paper. The title and author names are listed on this sheet as they will be published, both on your paper and on the Table of Contents. Please review and ensure the information is correct and advise us if any changes need to be made. In addition, please review your paper as a whole for typographical and essential corrections. Your PDF proof has been enabled so that you can comment on the proof directly using Adobe Acrobat. For further information on marking corrections using Acrobat, please visit http://journalauthors.tandf.co.uk/ production/acrobat.asp; https://authorservices.taylorandfrancis.com/how-to-correct-proofs-with-adobe/ The CrossRef database (www.crossref.org/) has been used to validate the references. Changes resulting from mismatches are tracked in red font. AUTHOR QUERIES QUERY NO. QUERY DETAILS No Queries RPOP1696048 Techset Composition India (P) Ltd., Bangalore and Chennai, India 3/27/2020 Patterns of Prejudice, 2020 Vol. 54, No. 1-2, 1–16, https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2019.1696048 (Anti) ‘new antisemitism’ as a transnational field of racial governance 5 ESTHER ROMEYN 10 15 QA: Coll: 20 25 This article sets out to discuss the emergence of (anti) ‘new antisemitism’ as a transnational field of governance, and particularly as a field of racial governance. Romeyn’s interest is not so much in the ‘facts’ of antisemitism or ‘new’ antisemitism, but in the ways in which it functions as a ‘power-knowledge’ field in which a cast of actors—global governance actors, such as the United Nations, UNESCO, the Organisation for Security and Co-Operation in Europe, the European Commission, non-governmental organizations, experts and scholars, and politicians—set out to define, invent measuring tools and technologies, analyse, formulate policy statements and programmes, and develop ‘interventions’ to address and redress (‘fight’) the ‘problem’. Embedded in the new antisemitism as a field of governance are the assumptions that, ideologically, it is imbricated in the universalist antiracism of the liberal left, and that, culturally, it emanates to a significant extent from within ethnocultural or ethno-religious attitudes peculiar to populations originating from Northern Africa, the Maghreb or, more specifically, from majority Islamic countries. With respect to the latter groups, global governance actors concerned with the fight against the ‘new antisemitism’ instate a ‘regime’ that performatively enacts boundaries of belonging. This regime erects an interior frontier around culture/religion that effectively externalizes and racializes antisemitism. ABSTRACT antisemitism, European multiculturalism, New Right, racism KEYWORDS 30 35 40 45 identity, Holocaust memory, Islamophobia, his paper sets out to discuss the emergence of ‘anti’ antisemitism as a transnational field of governance and, particularly within the context of the discourse of a ‘new antisemitism’, as a transnational field of racial governance. The concept of a ‘new antisemitism’ first gained traction in the 1970s and 1980s. It proposed that classic antisemitism, associated traditionally with a biological race concept, prejudice against Jews and the far right, had been replaced with a new form of antisemitism, which expressed itself as an ‘animus against Israel’ and ‘insensitivity and indifference to Jewish concerns’. The locus of this new antisemitism had shifted as well, from the far right to T The author would like to thank the conveners and participants of the workshops ‘Connected Pasts and Futures: Jews and Muslims of Europe’ (London School of Economics) and ‘Critique of Religion and Framing of Jews and Muslims’ (University of Amsterdam) for their comments on earlier drafts of this article. © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 2 Patterns of Prejudice 50 55 60 65 70 Arab nations, as well as to pro-Arab elements and radical-left movements in Europe and Latin America.1 As a concept and a phenomenon, the ‘new antisemitism’ has been subject to intense scholarly debate, particulaly following a significant uptick in antisemitic incidents since the early 2000s.2 However, in this paper, my interest is not so much in the (very much politicized) concept and ‘facts’ of the ‘new antisemitism’. Rather, it is in precisely how the concept of a new antisemitism gains sway, is translated into ‘facts’ and is transposed into policy measures and legal instruments. In other words, this paper will trace the ways in which the ‘new antisemitism’ has come to function as a ‘power-knowledge’ field in which a cast of actors set out to define, invent measuring tools (indexes, surveys) to benchmark, analyse, formulate policy statements and programmes (what Foucault calls a ‘regime’), and develop ‘interventions’ to address (‘fight’) the ‘problem’. Irrespective of the many different interpretations of, and lack of consensus over, the ‘new antisemitism’, global governance actors—in this case the United Nations, UNESCO, the Organisation for Co-operation and Security in Europe (OSCE), the European Commissio (EC), civil society organizations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), experts and scholars— collectively operate, as William Walters has argued in another context, as an ‘active and constitutive force which shapes the social world in particular ways with particular political consequences’.3 What global governance actors instate around the concept of the ‘new antisemitism’ is a ‘regime’ that performatively enacts boundaries of belonging. It 1 75 2 80 85 3 90 Jewish Telegraphic Agency, ‘ADL officials say anti-Semitism rampant throughout the world’, 6 March 1974, available at www.jta.org/1974/03/06/archive/adl-officials-sayanti-semitism-rampant-throughout-the-world (viewed 18 February 2020); Lucy S. Dawidowicz, ‘The real anti-Semitism in America, by Nathan and Ruth Ann Perlmutter’, Commentary, October 1982, available at www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/ the-real-anti-semitism-in-america-by-nathan-and-ruth-ann-perlmutter (viewed 18 February 2020). Brian Klug, ‘The myth of the new anti-Semitism’, The Nation, 15 January 2004, available at www.thenation.com/article/myth-new-anti-semitism (viewed 18 February 2020); Jonathan J. Judaken, ‘So what’s new? Rethinking the “new antisemitism” in a global age’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 42, no. 4–5, 2008, 531–60; Matti Bunzl, ‘Between antiSemitism and Islamophobia: some thoughts on the New Europe’, American Ethnologist, vol. 32, no. 4, 2005, 499–508; Antony Lerman, ‘9/11 and the destruction of the shared understanding of antisemitism’, openDemocracy, 14 September 2011, available at www.opendemocracy.net/antony-lerman/911-and-destruction-of-sharedunderstanding-of-antisemitism (viewed 18 February 2020); Antony Lerman, ‘The “new antisemitism”’, openDemocracy, 29 September 2015, available at www.opendemocracy. net/mirrorracisms/antony-lerman/new-antisemitism (viewed 18 February 2020); Amy Kaplan, ‘Stephen Bannon and the old/new anti-Semitism’, Al Jazeera, 30 November 2016, available at www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2016/11/stephen-bannonoldnew-anti-semitism-161129145402158.html (viewed 18 February 2020). William Walters, ‘Imagined migration world: the European Union’s anti-illegal immigration discourse’, in Martin Geiger and Antoine Pécoud (eds), The Politics of Migration Management (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave 2010), 73–95 (73). ESTHER ROMEYN 95 100 105 110 115 120 125 articulates policy challenges that, in the context of the post-9/11 securitization paradigm, have increasingly been framed in terms of ‘combat’, as an ‘ultrapolitics’ in which the distinction between belonging/non-belonging easily morphs into that of the Schmittian distinction of ‘friend/foe’, demanding increasingly authoritarian sovereign decision-making.4 I suggest the term ‘racial governance’ to call attention to the fact that embedded in the ‘new antisemitism’ as a field of governance is the assumption that it emanates to a significant extent from ethnocultural or ethno-religious attitudes specific to populations originating from the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) countries, especially those with an Islamic background. For Étienne Balibar, race installs what he calls an ‘interior frontier’ that is reinforced by affective cultures of fear and hate. As a site of both enclosure and contact, Balibar notes, an interior frontier entails ‘internal distinctions’ within a territory, and within a community whose essence is seen as hinging on intangible ‘moral attitudes’.5 In a self-described postcolonial, ‘post-racism’ world, such interior frontiers are increasingly erected around culture/religion. What has been alternatively termed neo-, cultural or differentialist racism constructs a ‘racism without race’ that takes culture, rather than biology, as the root cause of ‘insurmountable differences’.6 In this context, there is a confluence between the concept of a ‘new antisemitism’ and the culturalization of race, which critics have regarded as one of the key signatures of New Right thought. The New Right aimed to resurrect Europe’s conservative intellectual traditions and rehabilitate extreme-right political positions, discredited by the taint of fascism, by divesting the movement of its overt biological racist rhetoric. In this project, which started in the 1960s, capturing the ‘key semantic terrain’ of culture was crucial. Alain de Benoist, one of the movement’s intellectual leaders, articulated his interpretation of the concept of culture around the idea of ‘rootedness’ and made it the lynchpin for what he termed a ‘right to difference’ that was steadily being undermined by bureaucratic domination, globalization and the universalisms of the Enlightenment tradition.7 As Pierre-André Taguieff has noted, the ‘right to difference’ changed from being a means of defending oppressed minorities and their ‘cultural rights’ into an instrument for legitimating the most extreme appeals for the self4 5 130 6 7 135 3 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Afterword: the lesson of Rancière’, in Jacques Rancière (ed.), The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. from the French by Gabriel Rockhill (London and New York: Continuum 2004), 69–79. As discussed in Ann Stoler, ‘Sexual affronts and racial frontiers: national identity, “mixed bloods” and the cultural genealogies of Europeans in colonial Southeast Asia’, CSST Working Paper 64, May 1991, 3, available on the Deep Blue website at https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/51220/454.pdf;sequence=1 (viewed 18 February 2020). Esther Romeyn, ‘Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: spectropolitics and immigration’, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 31, no. 6, 2014, 77–101. Douglas R. Holmes, Integral Europe: Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press 2000), 68. 4 Patterns of Prejudice 140 defence of a ‘threatened’ national (and/or European) identity.8 In shifting its rhetoric from ‘racist ethnophobia’ to ‘cultural ethnophilia’, the New Right inverted multicultural anti-racism into a ‘multiculturalism of the right’.9 It was Benoist’s celebration of ‘ethno-pluralism’ and his ‘defense of threatened or minority cultures’ and ‘different ways of life’ that in the 1980s and 1990s provided resurgent radical right-wing, populist and neo-fascist parties (such as the Front National, the Italian Lega Nord and the British National Party) with the intellectual veneer to give their political platforms based on racism and Islamophobia a new aura of respectability.10 145 Anti antisemitism as an autoimmune response 150 155 160 165 170 Antony Lerman has pointed to the paradoxical consequences of the recasting of antisemitism primarily as ‘anti-Israel rhetoric emanating largely from Muslim sources’ and an anti-Zionist left, and the tendency to attribute the increase in antisemitic incidents to Muslim perpetrators.11 At the European level, the so-called ‘Jewish question’ has been declared resolved, as Jewish minorities have been ‘normalized’. Jews, Matti Bunzl states, ‘no longer figure as the principal Other but as the veritable embodiment of the postnational order’.12 That growing sense of Jewish belonging in Europe since the 1980s can be attributed, as Lerman suggests, to the success of multiculturalism and the influence of the culture of universal human rights.13 Jews have come to serve as markers of the European ‘transcendence’ of its fateful history and, accordingly, are assimilated into a universalized interpretation of the Holocaust as paradigmatic victims of racism.14 This universalization has been encapsulated in a European identity and memory discourse in which Jews are defined as paradigmatic Europeans in a Europe defined as ‘unity in diversity’. In the discourse of the new antisemitism, however, multiculturalism carries the blame for the rise in antisemitism, which is interpreted as a manifestation of multiculturalism’s naive optimism in the possibility of overcoming ‘irreconcilable’ cultural differences. The ‘new antisemitism’, in this view, exemplifies the fundamental impossibility 8 9 10 175 180 11 12 13 14 Pierre-André Taguieff, ‘From race to culture: the New Right’s view of European identity’, Telos, no. 98–9, 1993, 99–125 (125). Alberto Spektorowski, ‘The French New Right: differentialism and the idea of ethnophilian exclusionism’, Polity, vol. 33, no. 2, 2000, 283–303 (293). Tamir Bar-On, ‘Transnationalism and the French Nouvelle Droite’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 45, no. 3, 2011, 199–223 (207); Martin A. Lee, The Beast Reawakens: Fascism’s Resurgence from Hitler’s Spymasters to Today’s Neo-Nazi Groups and Right-Wing Extremists (New York and London: Routledge 2000), 214. Lerman, ‘9/11 and the destruction of the shared understanding of antisemitism’. Bunzl, ‘Between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia’, 502. Lerman, ‘9/11 and the destruction of the shared understanding of antisemitism’. Romeyn, ‘Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia’. ESTHER ROMEYN 185 190 195 200 205 210 215 220 225 5 of successfully integrating Muslim minorities into European values, and marks the limits of European ‘unity in diversity’. One way to understand the traction that this undermining of multiculturalism (and the agendas of anti-racism and the promotion of human rights with which it is associated) has gained is in terms of what Jacques Derrida (in his discussion of anti-terrorism responses after 9/11) has described as an ‘autoimmunitary’ response. For Derrida, an autoimmunitary response is a process in which ‘a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, “itself” works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its “own” immunity’.15 This response is dictated by the temporality of a traumatism. Trauma cannot be appropriated by the present or relegated to the past, but remains open to the future and is always on the lookout for the ‘precursory signs of what threatens to happen’.16 As a political community, the European Union is defined by the moral imperative of ‘Never Again’, which, in response to the historical trauma of the Holocaust, issues both an injunction and a repetition compulsion. European identity is defined and benchmarked by the European fight against, and the gradual ‘overcoming’ of, antisemitism, in which antisemitism stands for—is the synecdoche of—the ultimate racism. In that sense, one could say that the policy responses to resurgent antisemitism are ideologically overdetermined and can easily derail into an autoimmunitary process. According to Derrida, contradictions and paradoxes are the necessary consequence of this autoimmunitary overdetermination, and untangling these contradictions requires carefully calibrated conceptual and practical distinctions. And, as he points out, ‘what remains obscure, dogmatic, or precritical does not prevent the powers that be, the so-called legitimate powers, from making use of these notions when it seems opportune. On the contrary, the more confused a concept, the more it lends itself to opportunistic appropriation.’17 Pre-existing conditions The preconditions or, rather, pre-existing conditions for the autoimmune response (the discrediting of anti-racism and multicultural conviviality) facilitated by the notion of a new antisemitism, then, are embedded in the epistemological and political (power-knowledge) context that structures and frames the discussion of the new antisemitism at the transnational level of global governance. It is a consequence of the fact that, at the level of global governance, the discussion of antisemitism has historically been subsumed under the concept of racism. 15 Jacques Derrida and Giovanna Borradori, ‘Autoimmunity: real and symbolic suicides— a dialogue with Jacques Derrida’, in Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 2003), 85–136 (94). 16 Ibid., 96–7. 17 Ibid., 103–4. 6 Patterns of Prejudice 230 235 240 245 250 255 260 265 270 At the level of global governance, antisemitism was housed under the umbrella of racism in the original definition of that term, in the context of the anti-racism principles embedded in the United Nations Charter as well as the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As Étienne Balibar has pointed out in ‘The Construction of Racism’, the aggregate concept of racism was meant to facilitate what UNESCO previously called a ‘programme of disseminating scientific facts designed to remove what is commonly known as racial prejudice’.18 It was put forward in those two declarations of 1950 and 1951 by a group of biologists, anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists convened under the auspices of UNESCO and at the behest of the United Nations Economic and Social Council. Framed in the context of the post-Second World War period and in the aftermath of the Nuremberg trials, as well as the emergence of insurgent anti-colonial liberation struggles and civil rights movements protesting forms of social segregation and apartheid based on skin colour, these declarations relied on a ternary system that identified antisemitism alongside colonialism and apartheid as specific forms of what, from that point onwards, came to be captured under the single term ‘racism’. It identified Nazi Germany as the paradigmatic example of institutionalized antisemitism, discussed colonial racism in terms of racial supremacism and the division of humankind into superior and inferior races, and identified racial prejudice based on skin colour as the legacy of slavery that continued to be applied to descendants of slaves. As an aggregate term, the concept of racism, Balibar points out, enabled the identification of ‘social and ideological’ analogies and a ‘questioning [of] the connection between the institution of inequality and the phenomenon of extreme violence, either through the form of forced labor or of extermination’.19 As Balibar explains, as a power-knowledge field, institutions like the United Nations and UNESCO borrowed from the disciplinary power of the sciences to develop policy instruments aimed at the ‘progressive abolition of racism by science and scientific vulgarization, pedagogy, and legislation’.20 Racism, according to experts convened by UNESCO, was based on ‘racial doctrine’ and ‘racial myth’, ‘a creed and an emotional attitude’ that was a product of a ‘long-standing confusion of race and culture’, and a ‘fundamentally antirational system of thought’ thriving on ‘scientifically false ideas’.21 Jews, the UNESCO Four Statements on the Race Question read, ‘were sacrificed to 18 The Race Question in Modern Science: The Race Concept. Results of an Inquiry (Paris: UNESCO 1952), 6, available at ps://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000073351 (viewed 25 March 2020). For a discussion, see Étienne Balibar, ‘The construction of racism’, Actuel Marx, no. 38, 2005, 11–28 (17), English version available at www. cairn-int.info/article-E_AMX_038_0011–the-construction-of-racism.htm (viewed 18 February 2020). 19 Balibar, ‘The construction of racism’, 18. 20 Ibid., 20. 21 The Race Question in Modern Science, 5. ESTHER ROMEYN 275 7 beliefs about race which had no scientific validity’.22 In a sense, racism is like religion and, by consequence, religion is like racism, that is, signifying closed and bounded world-views. Overcoming prejudice is structured as a process of individuation and emancipation from collective myths that follows the progressive Enlightenment ideal of humanity’s self-improvement.23 Semantic instability 280 285 290 295 300 305 310 315 The conceptionalization of racism as an aggregate term that tried to capture a number of different racial formations, then, is troubled by a great degree of semantic instability. Semantic instability is marked by ‘irreducible trouble spots on the borders between concepts, indecision in the very concept of the border’. According to Derrida, it introduces a ‘speculative disorder, a conceptual chaos or zone of passing turbulence in public or political language’. This turbulence is susceptible to ‘strategies and relations of force’. As Derrida points out: ‘The dominant power is the one that manages to impose and, thus, to legitimate, indeed to legalize (for it is always a question of law) on a national or world stage, the terminology and thus the interpretation that best suits it in a given situation.’24 On the one hand, the semantic instability embedded in the racism concept thus provided rival superpowers with an incentive to engage in negotiations on an international level. But, on the other, since the 1960s, as a consequence of that very instability, struggles for hegemony in the fight over definitions and interpretations of racism have been cast in terms of hierarchies, equivalences, substitutions and inversions that find rhetorical expression in shorthand and slogans such as Holocaust v. holocausts, Zionism = racism, Zionism = apartheid, Zionism = antisemitism, anti-Zionism = antisemitism. For an example, one only has to look at the process of drafting the UN Convention on Racial Discrimination (1965) and the draft Convention on Religious Intolerance, which was never ratified. While both conventions were called in response to a series of antisemitic incidents in various parts of the world in 1959–60, and acknowledged the history of antisemitism as the most typical form of racialism and as the incentive for drafting the conventions, it was the Israeli–Palestinian conflict that dictated the line-up of solidarities and the resulting omission of the mention of antisemitism from the Convention on Racial Discrimination statement. This was officially on the grounds that no specific form of discrimination should be mentioned but, in reality, it was because the inclusion of the specific mention of antisemitism was interpreted by Arab delegations as support for Israel. Arab states supported a Soviet counter-proposal to condemn Zionism, Nazism and neo-Nazism, arguing 22 UNESCO, Four Statements on the Race Question (Paris: UNESCO 1969), 17. 23 Balibar, ‘The construction of racism’, 20. 24 Derrida and Borradori, ‘Autoimmunity’, 105. 8 Patterns of Prejudice 320 325 330 335 340 345 that Zionism and Nazism were appropriate examples of racial discrimination while antisemitism was not a universal phenomenon but solely a western phenomenon, whose semantic meaning was ambiguous since the majority of Semites were Arabs.25 A compromise that proposed mentioning antisemitism in the draft Convention on Religious Intolerance as the ‘most blatant phenomenon of religious intolerance and discrimination’ (on a par with apartheid as mentioned in the Convention on Racial Discrimination) was opposed by Communist member states who did not want to foreground religious discrimination, especially considering their treatment of Jewish minorities; it was also opposed by Arab states, who declared that religious intolerance far exceeded antisemitism. Arab states moreover alleged that Israel wanted antisemitism singled out for political motives in order to propagate the view that anyone opposing Israel or Zionism was an antisemite, and cited the example of charges of antisemitism levelled against the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee for taking the side of Arab refugees. The subsequent outbreak of the Six Day War in 1967 effectively doomed negotiations for the Convention on Religious Intolerance and its adoption into the corpus of international human rights law.26 Successive declarations of the emergence of a ‘new’ antisemitism in the 1970s and 1980s closely followed developments in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, as well as UN discussions and declarations (such as the 1975 UN Declaration 3379, revoked in 1991) in response to that conflict, condemning Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination. Anti-Zionism is the new antisemitism, Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban declared in a speech to the American Jewish Congress in 1973, in which he insisted that ‘the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all’.27 Eban clarified his view in an editorial in the New York Times in 1975: ‘Classical anti-Semitism denies the equal rights of Jews as citizens within society. Anti-Zionism denies the equal rights of the Jewish people to its lawful sovereignty within the community of nations. The common principle in the two cases is discrimination.’28 In the United States, one the strongest promoters of various instalments of the ‘new antisemitism’ thesis has been the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) 350 355 360 25 Natan Lerner, ‘Anti-Semitism as racial and religious discrimination under United Nations conventions’, in Yoram Dinstein (ed.), Israel Yearbook on Human Rights, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Israel Press 1971), 103–15 (111). 26 Roberta Cohen, ‘United Nations’ stand on antisemitism: principles, priorities, prejudices’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 2, no. 2, 1968, 21–4; Lerner, ‘Anti-Semitism as racial and religious discrimination under United Nations conventions’. 27 Abba Eban, ‘Our place in the human scheme’, Congress Bi-Weekly, vol. 40, no. 6, 30 March 1973, xxv. 28 Abba Eban, ‘Zionism and the UN’, New York Times, 3 November 1975, available at www.nytimes.com/1975/11/03/archives/zionism-and-the-un.html (viewed 25 March 2020). ESTHER ROMEYN 365 370 375 380 9 which in 1974 published a book entitled The New Anti-Semitism.29 During the 1990s, in the context of the prospect of the Israeli–Palestinian peace process, the political value of the ‘new antisemitism’ was relatively low. Its currency, however, increased drastically (both in volume and in credit/credibility) after 2001 when, in the aftermath of the semantic warfare that characterized the Durban anti-racism conference, the ‘new antisemitism’ thesis found a new echo chamber in the post-9/11 sense of a ‘New World Order’ necessitating a global war on terror.30 The 2001 Durban anti-racism conference (organized under the auspices of UNESCO and the UN Human Rights Commission against the background of the collapse of peace negotiations and the outbreak of the second intifada), instead of reaching a consensus on a platform for common action, fell apart under the weight of the tensions accumulated by that point over the use and the application of the term ‘racism’ and the various analogies and inversions pushed by various factions. As Balibar points out: Some delegations called for the assimilation of Zionism with racist ideologies, while others defended the idea of anti-Zionism as the modern form of antisemitism; some delegations upheld while others rejected the idea that the economic and cultural consequences of the African slave trade called for the same ‘reparations’ as genocides and in particular the extermination of the Jews in Europe; some wanted to include caste discrimination in Southeast Asian countries (primarily India) among the manifestations of racism, while others opposed it.31 385 The securitization of ‘new antisemitism’ 390 395 400 405 There is no doubt that the Durban conference solidified a global imaginary of Palestinian liberation and a solidarity movement of racial justice and anti-colonialism activists in which the Israel = apartheid/ Zionism = racism analogies were key to a strategic attempt to shift the perception of victim/perpetrator.32 In some cases, classic antisemitic tropes hitchhiked along. Moreover, I do not want to dismiss the fact that there was indeed a surge of hate speech, synagogue bombings, desecration of cemeteries and acts of murderous antisemitism that coincided with, and were likely provoked by, the collapse of the Israeli– Palestinian peace process and the second Palestinian intifada. 29 Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein, The New Anti-Semitism (New York: McGrawHill 1974). See also Jewish Telegraphic Agency, ‘ADL officials say anti-semitism rampant throughout the world’; and Dawidowicz, ‘The real anti-Semitism in America, by Nathan and Ruth Ann Perlmutter’. 30 Lerman, ‘9/11 and the destruction of the shared understanding of antisemitism’. 31 Balibar, ‘The construction of racism’, 14. 32 Jon Soske and Sean Jacobs, Apartheid Israel: The Politics of an Analogy (Chicago: Haymarket Books 2015). 10 Patterns of Prejudice 410 415 420 425 430 435 In response, Jewish NGOs and the Israel lobby in the United States strategically organized around the new antisemitism as an ideological tool. The Durban conference was followed by a spike in publications on the new antisemitism, such as the ADL director Abe Foxman’s Never Again: The Threat of the New Antisemitism and other titles, such as Phyllis Chesler’s The New Anti-Semitism (2003), Gabriel Schoenfeld’s The Return of Anti-Semitism (2004) and Alvin Rosenfeld’s collection Resurgent Anti-Semitism (2013).33 The thesis put forward in these books was that, in the words of Jonathan Sacks, then chief rabbi of Britain and the Commonwealth: ‘What we are witnessing today is the second great mutation of antisemitism in modern times, from racial antisemitism to religious anti-Zionism …’ As classic antisemitism targeted the individual Jew, so the new antisemitism targeted Jews collectively as a sovereign people. Israel, according to Alan Dershowitz, had become ‘the Jew among Nations’.34 Moreover, the ‘new Judaeophobia’, as Taguieff, the acute analyst of the New Right’s culturalization of racism called it, was masked by anti-racism and the ‘ideology’ of multiculturalism. As Taguieff came to see it, the defence of a ‘right to difference’ was warranted in the case of Jews who, in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, were the victims of relentless attacks from the social-democratic left that were couched in a universalizing language of anti-racism but masked a rabid antisemitism.35 As Alain Finkielkraut put it: ‘[The new antisemitism] is born of this … antiracist exuberance that recodes all dramas—current or ancient—into the terms of one of only two alternatives: tolerance and stigmatization’, reducing the complexities of the world into ‘Nazis’ and ‘victims’.36 This rhetorical warfare was inflected by the new geopolitical realities. After 9/11, the idea of the new antisemitism as essentially ‘anti-Zionism’ fit in with the scenarios of religious war and a clash of civilizations that were pushed to explain the conflict. The new antisemitism was accordingly ‘weaponized’ and securitized. Within this context, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict was redefined as a religious war, and Israel logically came to be seen as the ‘first line of defence’ of western civilization.37 Within Israel, this coincided with the establishment of what Oren Yiftachel and As’ad Ghanem call an ‘ethnocratic regime’, which in their definition is both non-authoritarian because of the granting of significant 440 445 450 33 Abraham H. Foxman, Never Again: The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco 2003); Phyllis Chesler, The New Anti-Semitism: The Current Crisis and What We Must Do about It (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass 2003); Gabriel Schoenfeld, The Return of Anti-Semitism (San Francisco: Encounter Books 2004); Alvin H. Rosenfeld (ed.), Resurgent Anti-Semitism: Global Perspectives (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 2013). 34 Sacks and Dershowitz, quoted in Klug, ‘The myth of the new anti-Semitism’. 35 Taguieff is discussed in the first part of Judaken, ‘So what’s new?’, esp. 534–6, 544. 36 Finkielkraut, quoted in ibid., 548. 37 Slavoj Žižek, quoted in Lerman, ‘9/11 and the destruction of the shared understanding of antisemitism’. ESTHER ROMEYN 455 460 465 470 475 480 485 490 495 11 civil-political rights to ethnonational minorities, and non-democratic because of the ‘rupturing of the demos’ through the ‘seizure of the state by one ethnonational group’. The legitimation for the project of reinforcing the exclusively Jewish character of the state through a series of anti-democratic bills was provided by the security argument.38 Durban was the catalyst for Jewish NGOs (backed by the newly established Israeli Monitoring Forum on Antisemitism) to push the new antisemitism thesis forward in new forums, such as the OSCE, the European Monitoring Centre against Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC), later relaunched as the Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA), and the European Commission (EC). The idea of using the OSCE as a vehicle for combatting antisemitism was proposed by the American Jewish Committee, through the Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights, the organization with which the group is connected, and with support from the US government. It resulted in the first high-level conference by an international organization, held in Vienna in June 2003, devoted specifically to antisemitism. In April 2004, a follow-up OSCE Conference on antisemitism was held in Berlin. As a quid pro quo (primarily in response to pressure from Turkey and from indigenous Muslim communities in the Balkans), the OSCE was to hold a separate conference on racism, xenophobia and discrimination that would specifically address the concerns of Muslim communities in Europe. Antisemitism, a number of participants to the Vienna conference pointed out, was primarily anti-Zionist in inspiration, and perpetrators of antisemitic violence all hailed ‘from the “sensitive” suburban neighbourhood, notably around Paris’. New antisemitism was particularly ‘insidious because of its sophistication and its disguise as antiracism’, and it was ‘global and genocidal’.39 Although the US and German governments, with the Jewish NGOs, pushed for a stand-alone declaration that would recognize the ‘singularity of anti-Semitism among other forms of racism’, the resulting declaration was more ambiguous when it came to pointing to the source of the ‘new antisemitism’.40 The 2004 Berlin declaration that came out of the conference embedded antisemitism within the universal standards of human rights and in the anti-racism struggle that follows the principle of non-discrimination, as well as defining it as a form of racism and a problem of human rights. It proposed combatting antisemitism through inter-community dialogue, implementing measures of monitoring, and the legal enforcement and criminalization of racist violence. It also asserted that Holocaust education should be 38 Oren Yiftachel and As’ad Ghanem, ‘Understanding “ethnocratic” regimes: the politics of seizing contested territories’, Political Geography, vol. 23, no. 6, 2004, 647–76 (650); Soske and Jacobs, Apartheid Israel. 39 Michael Whine, ‘International organizations: combating anti-Semitism in Europe’, Jewish Political Studies Review, vol. 16, no. 3/4, 2004, 73–88 (77), available on the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs website at www.jcpa.org/phas/phas-whine-f04.htm (viewed 19 February 2020). 40 Ibid., 84–5. 12 Patterns of Prejudice 500 505 510 515 520 525 530 535 540 broadly anchored and identify antisemitism as the dominant ideology of National Socialism, but also confront antisemitism ‘that comes from sections of the Muslim community and anti-Semitic forms of criticism of Israel’. The tripartite division that was embedded in the universalist aggregate framework of the anti-racism struggle was re-established in the formation of three working groups and the appointment of three commissioners devoted, respectively, to: 1) combatting antisemitism and promoting Holocaust remembrance; 2) combatting discrimination against Muslims; and 3) combatting racism, xenophobia and discrimination.41 The EUMC, meanwhile, got embroiled in controversy when it suppressed a report on antisemitism produced by the Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung (Centre for Research on Antisemitism), which the EUMC had tasked with evaluating the data collected by a network of NGOs. The suppressed report, commissioned originally by the European Jewish Congress, pinpointed Muslim expatriate communities, young Muslims and people of African origin in countries like Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom as responsible for much of the rise in antisemitism. A second EUMC report suggested that the far right remained the main promoter of antisemitism in Europe. In response, the European Jewish Congress and World Jewish Congress leadership took to the press to accuse ‘European institutions of intellectual dishonesty and moral treachery’, and called the failure to act on the findings of the report on the part of the European Commission ‘politically motivated’.42 This forced Romano Prodi, President of the European Commission, into action, and led to the creation of an oversight committee composed of EC and EJC officials to monitor antisemitism, and the organization of a seminar ‘Against Anti-Semitism, For a Union of Diversity’, that convened in February 2004. Prodi’s speech at the seminar, entitled ‘A Union of Minorities’, stereotyped Jews as the cosmopolitan ‘archetypical minority’ in a Europe defined as a ‘Union of diversity’ and a ‘Union of minorities’, and constructed the EU as the apotheosis of the overcoming of ‘tribalisms’ through its dedication to universal ‘core values’ such as ‘respect for human rights, respect for minorities and respect for human dignity’. ‘Our cultural diversity and multi-ethnic character can vaccinate against fresh manifestations of anti-Semitism and new forms of prejudice’, he proclaimed.43 Prodi’s speech is indicative of the straddling act that the ‘fight’ against the new antisemitism at the EU level provokes. On one level, the fight against 41 Ibid. See also Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights, ‘Statement OSCE conference on tolerance and the fight against racism, xenophobia and discrimination, Brussels, 13 and 14 September 2004’, available at www.osce.org/cio/36471? download=true (viewed 19 February 2020); Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights, ‘OSCE conference on anti-Semitism and other forms of intolerance’, 23 June 2005, available at www.osce.org/cio/15778?download=true (viewed 19 February 2020). 42 Whine, ‘International organizations’, 83. ESTHER ROMEYN 545 550 555 560 565 570 575 580 585 13 antisemitism continues to be embedded in the universalist, pedagogical framework of human rights, tolerance and anti-racism. On another, it gives in to the pressures to ‘singularize’ antisemitism. For instance, in his speech, Prodi recognized that there were ‘vestiges of the historical anti-Semitism’ but that today’s ‘Europe is not the Europe of the 1930s and 1940s’ in that there is no longer any ‘organized form of anti-Semitism’. The new antisemitism, Prodi claimed, is fuelled by the ‘unresolved conflict in the Middle East’, and thrives on the ‘social frustrations of new minorities established through migration into many Member States of the Union. Such frustrations imported into Europe do sometimes translate into anti-Semitic acts.’44 Thus, Prodi explains resurgent European antisemitism primarily in terms of what Esra Özüyrek has called an ‘export-import’ theory, in which antisemitism is effectively externalized, tribalized and racialized. In doing so, the ‘export-import theory’ constitutes European identity as ‘redeemed’, universal and ‘innocent’.45 In the wake of the scandal that enveloped the EUMC in 2003, the agency developed a ‘working definition’of antisemitism that defined it as ‘a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.’ In an explanatory note, the EUMC stated that antisemitism could also ‘target the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity’. While criticism of Israel cannot be regarded as antisemitic when it is comparable to that levelled against any other country, holding Israel to a ‘double standard’ or ‘holding Jews collectively responsible for actions in the state of Israel’, according to the statement, is.46 The working definition, however, was not widely publicized, and eventually withdrawn in 2012 by the FRA (Fundamental Rights Agency), which succeeded the EUMC, amid concern that the statement was overly polemical and might be politicized to infringe upon the freedom of expression in debates on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. 43 Romano Prodi, ‘A union of minorities’, Brussels, 19 February 2004, available on the European Commission website at http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-04-85_ en.htm (viewed 20 February 2020). 44 Ibid. 45 Esra Özyürek, ‘Export-import theory and the racialization of anti-Semitism: Turkishand Arab-only prevention programs in Germany’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 58, no. 1, 2016, 40–65. 46 François Dubuisson, ‘The definition of anti-Semitism by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC): towards a criminalisation of criticism of Israeli policy?’, July 2005, 1, available on the European Coordination of Committees and Associations for Palestine at www.eccpalestine.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/ EUMC_Dubuisson.pdf (viewed 20 February 2020). 14 Patterns of Prejudice Strange alliances 590 595 600 605 610 615 Efforts by the EUMC and its successor, the FRA, to link Holocaust education explicitly with a broader anti-racism and human rights agenda have repeatedly come under criticism from Jewish organizations for ‘being averse to identifying antisemitism as in any way central to the Holocaust’ and for denying that Jewish rights are ‘human rights’. Indeed, a broadly conceived human rights agenda, and the agencies and organizations that support it—such as the UN Commission for Human Rights, the EU, left-wing and humanitarian organizations—are framed as responsible for disseminating the new antisemitism. In 2016 the International Holocaust Remembrance Organization (IHRA) adopted a working definition on antisemitism that was based on the EUMC definition, and proposed it as ‘an example of responsible conduct for other international fora’ and an incentive for them ‘to take action on a legally binding working definition’.47 In its resolution on combatting antisemitism, adopted on 1 June 2017, the European Parliament urged ‘Member States and the Union institutions and agencies to adopt and apply the working definition of anti-Semitism employed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in order to support the judicial and law enforcement authorities in their efforts to identify and prosecute antiSemitic attacks more efficiently and effectively.’48 Not surprisingly, this recommendation has instigated a heated political debate about its possible consequences for freedom of expression in the context of critique on Israel. The governmentality of the new antisemitism thesis has fostered, and has been fostered by, a racial imaginary that centres on a particular psychosocial type of the ‘anti-Semitic Muslim’, which has become one of the metaphors of the parallel societies and the hermetically sealed, tribal, non-integrated identities supposedly fostered by multiculturalism. In this context, the fight against new antisemitism, as a power-knowledge field, has played a role in delegitimizing what has increasingly become defined as the ‘ideology of multiculturalism’, taking along with it the agendas of anti-racism and the promotion of human rights. It has enabled the increasing convergence of liberal and right-wing agendas around anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant platforms.49 620 625 630 47 IHRA, ‘Working definition of antisemitism’, 27 June 2016, available at www. holocaustremembrance.com/stories/working-definition-antisemitism (viewed 20 February 2020). 48 ‘P8_TA(2017)0243 Combating anti-semitism: European Parliament resolution of 1 June 2017 on combating anti-Semitism (2017/2692(RSP))’, 2, available on the European Parliament at www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+TA+P8TA-2017-0243+0+DOC+PDF+V0//EN (viewed 20 February 2020). 49 The OSCE conferences, for instance, added impetus to the introduction of Holocaust education programmes in primary and secondary school curricula (developed, inter alia, by the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. and the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam) which in some cases have ESTHER ROMEYN 635 640 645 650 655 Meanwhile, the extreme or far right’s co-optation of identity politics and the strategic place of anti ‘new antisemitism’ within its game plan of ‘mainstreaming’ its racially exclusivist identitarian platform contributes to the ‘convivial relations’, as Jasbir Puar calls them, that the far right has established with the neo-Zionist right in Israel and elsewhere.50 Indeed, the far right’s identitarian framework takes Jewish cultural particularism as a ‘model’ against the universalizing framework of Christian humanism and the Enlightenment. János Lázár, spokesman for the far-right Hungarian government, for instance, justified his country’s decision to block refugees from Syria and Iraq from crossing into Hungary on the basis that ‘refugees entering Europe now are strongly anti-Semitic’. ‘Where there are large numbers of immigrants, there is greater anti-Semitism—France and Germany, for example’, Lázár said. He also claimed Hungary had low levels of antisemitism.51 Extreme rightwing parties routinely combine declarations of support for Jews and Israel with statements that distance the party from past antisemitism. Part of the right-wing ritual of pledging allegiance to Israel is to lay a wreath at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and visiting settlements in the West Bank. In 2016 the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ, Austrian Freedom Party)— created in 1950 by a group of former Nazis—sponsored a conference on new antisemitism, which featured the Israeli secret agent who captured Adolf Eichmann as the star in a line-up of speakers who collectively expressed concern about a spike in antisemitic incidents that, the forum suggested, were Islamist in inspiration.52 That reference to the Eichmann trial was, arguably, highly symbolic. As Natan Sznaider pointed out in his book on Jewish cosmopolitan memory, the crucial difference between the Nuremberg trials and the Eichmann trial was that the latter reformulated ‘crimes against humanity’, the charge brought against the defendants at Nuremberg, as ‘crimes against the Jewish people’.53 The reference to the Eichmann trial in the FPÖ’s conference 660 50 665 51 52 670 53 675 15 specifically targeted pupils from migrant and Muslim backgrounds, as Esra Özyürek has argued in her analysis of such initiatives in Germany. See Özyürek, ‘Exportimport theory and the racialization of anti-Semitism’. Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2007). Jewish Telegraph Agency, ‘Refugees bring anti-Semitism to Europe, warns Hungarian minister’, 16 April 2016, available at www.timesofisrael.com/refugees-bring-antisemitism-to-europe-warns-hungarian-minister (viewed 20 February 2020). Glenn Greenwald, ‘Growing far-right nationalistic movements are dangerously antiMuslim-and pro-Israel’, Intercept, 30 November 2016, available at https://theintercept. com/2016/11/30/growing-far-right-nationalistic-movements-are-dangerously-antimuslim-and-pro-israel (viewed 20 February 2020); Cnaan Liphshiz, ‘Austria held Europe’s largest conference on anti-Semitism under far-right party’, Jewish Chronicle, 9 March 2018, available at https://jewishchronicle.timesofisrael.com/austria-heldeuropes-largest-conference-on-anti-semitism-under-far-right-party (viewed 20 February 2020). Natan Sznaider, Jewish Memory and the Cosmopolitan Order (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press 2011), 87–92, 107, 114–20. 16 Patterns of Prejudice 680 685 690 695 700 705 on new antisemitism is indicative of the particularist ‘correction’ that the ‘new anti-Semitism thesis’ wants to bring to the universalizing, ameliorist and pedagogical programme of (anti-)racism in which antisemitism has been embedded for most of the post-Second World War period. There are ample conceptual and intellectual reasons to re-evaluate the universalizing framework of racism and human rights, and its blind spots, and to singularize antisemitism. As Nasar Meer points out, one of the regrettable aspects of contemporary theories of race and racism has been that they have paid little attention to the question of antisemitism. Consequently, the longstanding imbrication of race and religion has remained invisible and undertheorized. The modern and biological bias in theories of race and racism has resulted in the forgetting of different histories of racism and racialization, such as the racialization of religion, and of Judaism and Islam in particular, which is constitutive of European modernity as a racial formation as such. The stumbling block for adequate measuring, analysis and understanding of the operations of contemporary and traditional forms of antisemitism as well as Islamophobia is thus ideological as well as semantic and epistemological.54 However, the ‘particularist correction’ proposed by proponents of the ‘new antisemitism’ is of an entirely different ideological provenance. It pushes, in the name of ‘ethnophilic’ identity politics and anti-antisemitism, for the auto-immune dismantling of the framework of multicultural conviviality and minority rights, and the legal instruments on which it rests. Esther Romeyn is Associate Lecturer in the Center for European Studies at the University of Florida. Her current work focuses the place of Holocaust memory in discourses on migration and refugees, and the entangled histories of Jews, Muslims and other migrants in Europe. She has published articles on these topics in Citizenship Studies, European Journal of Cultural Studies and Theory, Culture, and Society. Email: esromeyn@ufl.edu 710 715 720 54 Nasar Meer, ‘Semantics, scales and solidarities in the study of antisemitism and Islamophobia’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 36, no. 3, 2013, 500–15 (500).